History is indifferent to the fine points of literary composition - Saramago's The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

Oops, my schedule has slipped a bit.  I can tell you why: shame.  Book blogging shame.

Miguel at St. Orberose has spent November making other book bloggers look bad.  No offense.  He has been celebrating José Saramago month by writing and translating and making some sense of a fascinating and diverse range of material – plays, diaries, journalism, even a science fiction epic in verse.  Most of the texts he wrote about are otherwise unavailable in English.

What a resource.  When have I done anything this useful?  When have I wanted to work this hard?  It’s humbling.

Miguel spurred me to read Saramago’s 1984 novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, translated by Giovanni Pontiero, which follows Baltasar and Blimunda, the one I read earlier this year, and of course stars the great imaginary poet Ricardo Reis.

Reis returns to Lisbon from Brazil after years of exile.  His friend and fellow poet Fernando Pessoa has just died.  Salazar has been “Prime Minister” of Portugal for two or three years; dictator, really.  Reis is a monarchist, so he has some sympathy for certain aspects of Salazar’s rule. He does not really comprehend the rise of fascism, news of which, in Germany and Spain, runs through the novel.  Saramago’s novel is a political novel, but for the character the point is that his old beliefs have become irrelevant.  “[H]istory is indifferent to the fine points of literary composition” (295).

Despite the big events in the background, little happens in foreground of the novel:  Reis begins an affair with a chambermaid that deepens in surprising ways, pursues an affair with another woman of his own class – some surprises there, too - half-heartedly restarts his medical practice, and writes poems.  He also meets, once in a while, the deceased Fernando Pessoa:

He recognized him at once, though they had not seen each other for many years.  Nor did he think it strange that  Fernando Pessoa should be sitting there waiting for him.  He said Hello, not expecting a reply, absurdity does not always obey logic, but Pessoa did in fact reply, saying Hello, and stretched out his hand, then they embraced.  Well, how have you been, one of them asked, or both, not that it matters, the question is so meaningless.  (64-5)

Not that this is so absurd, given that Ricardo Reis is an imaginary poet created by the actual poet Pessoa, that all of the biographical details (medicine, monarchism) are the invention of Pessoa, that Reis’s poems are written by Pessoa.  Why shouldn’t he outlive Pessoa by nine months?  In the real world, Pessoa has outlived Pessoa.

What else is in the book?  Lisbon, what a fine Lisbon novel.  Some time with Google maps was helpful, and also feasible, because Reis mostly stays in a small central area.  I could follow the “itinerary of the statues” on page 352, including Eça de Queiros and the epic poet Camões.

Saramago’s previous novel, Baltasar and Blimunda, is in the novel, mentioned a couple of times.  For example, out of almost nowhere, Saramago muses that Blimunda is a strange name.  The beauty of the voice Saramago developed is that it can go anywhere he wants.  I guess any author can do that, but few do.

Take careful note. No one can narrate everything. - Saramago provides information

This information is being provided, first because it is true and the truth is always worthwhile, and, second, to assist those who enjoy deciphering crisscross patterns of words and events.  (13)

Hey, that’s me!

Dolce Bellezza, a fan of a later Saramago novel, also took a crack at Baltasar and Blimunda recently.  If I am characterizing her post correctly, she found herself crushed under the weight of Saramago’s details.  The novel was much like the enormous stone, “the mother of all stone,” that lies in the portico of the church at the Mafra Palace:

To complete this description, once it has been carved and polished in Mafra, it will be only fractionally smaller, thirty-two by fourteen by three in the same order of dimensions, and one day, when measurements will no longer be taken in spans but in meters, others will describe the stone as being seven meters long, three meters wide, and sixty-four centimeters deep.  Take careful note.  (223)

There is that narratorial slippage again.  The narrator actually transforms into a modern tour guide:

Now let us pass to the next room, for we still have some way to go.

But the reader of Baltasar and Blimunda returns to the 18th century, where Saramago, along with the title character Baltasar, four hundred oxen, and “hordes of men,” spends an entire chapter moving the stone from the quarry to the construction site.  It is a dazzling showoff chapter in a novel that is not characterized by Saramago holding back.  Every stage of the movement of the stone is presented, along with lists of equipment and names.  Some minor characters have to be developed in order to crush at least one of them.

One of the workers improvises a story each night, a sort of fragmented fairy tale.  It does not have a satisfying ending:

José Pequeno protested:  One’s never heard such a tale narrated bit by bit.  Manuel Milho reminded him: Each day is a little bit of history, and no one can narrate everything.  (239)

Saramago gives it a shot, though.  I have no idea how much of the information about the stone and its transport is true and how much or what Saramago invented.  I would guess that, as I found with Sebald, the scene is lightly researched, that most of the historical detail can be found in one or two books.  It is easy enough to imagine Saramago, on a tour of Mafra, perhaps even as a child, being told about the giant stone and thinking “Now that could make a good story.”

A number of other chapters are similar, and just as good.  For example, the description of the logistics of a royal wedding, really an exchange of princesses between Portugal and Spain, which requires an enormous chain of carriages, horses, and servants.  The movement of the princess, of one person, is as difficult, is as great a folly, as the movement of a 31 metric ton stone.

“One day, the errors on which history is based will finally be clarified,” the narrator says in that chapter, a bit cryptically (277).  Saramago’s project is perhaps not so different than Sebald’s.  New, purposeful, fictional errors are set against old, accidental, factual errors.

Portugal will provide nothing other than the stone - Saramago's Baltasar and Blimunda

My other recent tour guide to Portugal has been José Saramago’s Baltasar and Blimunda (1982).  Where Antonio Tabucchi is an appreciative outsider, Saramago is a skeptical native.  Portuguese history and Portuguese culture are memorials of folly, universal human folly but also some particularly Portuguese folly.

The novel’s Portuguese title is Memorial do Convento, and much of the story of the novel is about the construction in the early 18th century of a convent of sorts, the gargantuan Baroque Mafra National Palace, a peculiar combination of Franciscan Monastery and royal residence.  The Wikipedia page has many photographs.  How I would like to visit it, however ridiculous the place is.  It may have been foolish to pour that much Brazilian gold and human labor into this monstrosity, but now Portugal is stuck with it.

Roughly speaking the argument is that just as Europe begins work on the Enlightenment, Portugal remains obstinately superstitious, brutal, wasteful, unscientific, venal, and backwards.

As the King João V thinks or says:

And if from this impoverished land of illiterates, rustics, and unskilled craftsmen one cannot expect refined arts and crafts, let them be brought from Europe for my convent at Mafra, and let all the other necessary adornments and embellishments be bought with the gold from my mines and revenues from my estates, whereby, as one friar will record for posterity, artisans abroad will get rich while we shall be admired for the splendors of our realm.  Portugal will provide nothing other than the stone, tile, and wood for burning, and men of brute force and empty hands.  (206)

Then follows a characteristically sinuous Saramago sentence that is much too long for me to type out.  The little slip in voice in that passage – “as one friar will record for posterity” – is part of my favorite aspect of the novel, Saramago’s brilliantly inventive use of omniscient narration.  He really can be anywhere and really does know everything, and as a result says some of the strangest things.

Saramago freely interrupts his free indirect passages.  Sometimes he adopts the “I” but the first person is always abandoned, or he gives the views of supernatural creatures (“Looking down on this activity, the devil marvels at his own innocence and compassion, for he could never have conceived such punishment to crown all those other punishments he metes out in hell,” 236).  The narrator’s attitude shifts, so that he often sounds like a man of the time of the story, but then argues with or mocks the beliefs of the characters.  He hops around in time, utterly unafraid of anachronism in his historical novel:

There is nothing worse than the life of a novice, save perhaps that of a shop assistant in years to come.  We were about to say that the novice is the shop assistant of God, as a certain Frei João de Nossa Senhora can testify, a former novice of this very same Franciscan Order, who will go [hmm, this sentence is also an awfully long one]…  A life of sacrifice always comes to the same thing, whether it be that of a novice, a shop assistant, or a recruit.  (301)

Much of the pleasure of the novel was seeing what odd claims the all-powerful narrator would make next, and then to see how, laid side by side, they were not so odd.  So more of that tomorrow, I guess.

This is the only Saramago book I have read.  I know what some of his other books are about, but I do not know what they are like, if this narrator, for example, is unique or typical.

Page numbers from the 1987 American first edition, translated by Giovanni Pontiero.